Black pig farming enables Miao girl Wu Zhenqiong to turn her life around
Although she has just reached the age of 30, Wu Zhenqiong already has 17 years of "work experience." At 13, she shouldered the burden of supporting her whole family and went out to work. At 21, she returned to her hometown in Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture, Guizhou, to start a business, raised more than 500 black pigs, and founded Liping County Laoyandao Ecological Breeding Co., Ltd.
Wu Zhenqiong is small and thin, weighing only 83 jin, yet she gets things done with the bold, decisive style of a "tomboy." When she was two, her father developed muscular dystrophy, and the family lived in hardship, often relying on relatives for help. When she was 11, her father died, and when she was 13, her mother, who had advanced skin cancer, also passed away. Facing two young brothers, the burden of the whole family fell on her shoulders.
She had no choice but to drop out of school and work, beginning to travel far and wide, working as a nanny in the county town, then waiting tables in the provincial capital, and then working on an assembly line in an electronics factory in Guangdong. It was during this time that she came up with the idea of starting a business raising black pigs.
"The bigger the city you go to, the less you can taste the meat flavor of your hometown." Wu Zhenqiong found that almost everyone she met felt the same way. She recalled that when she was little, a family member once bought green peppers and meat and stir-fried a dish, and she ate a full 3 big bowls of rice mixed with the sauce from the stir-fry.
Meat that fragrant was rarely tasted later on. "Young people all go out to work, and fewer and fewer people raise pigs the traditional way." Wu Zhenqiong spotted a business opportunity. She believed that pigs fed the way the grandparents in the village did, cutting fresh green grass every day and mixing it with rice husks, would certainly have better prospects than pigs fed on feed in the market.
Starting in 2010, Wu Zhenqiong opened a restaurant in her hometown and named it "Laoyandao." "Laoyandao" is a local term for cured meat; the cured meat is smoked, and cured meat with the bones left in curves like the shape of a knife. During festivals, it is an indispensable delicacy on the Miao family table.
The cured meat and fresh meat in the restaurant all came from ecologically raised black pigs fed on grass. Wu Zhenqiong came up with a slogan for the restaurant: "Searching for the taste of childhood, searching for the feeling of home." To make the pork taste more authentic, Wu Zhenqiong borrowed a relative's pigpen and raised 10 black pigs herself.
Before long, the restaurant became somewhat famous locally. After eating the black pig pork, many customers praised the meat quality repeatedly, and guests often specifically ordered meat to pack up and take away. Wu Zhenqiong felt it was time to expand the scale of breeding.
In 2012, Wu Zhenqiong, having had her first taste of the "sweetness" of entrepreneurship, built the 1440-sq-m "Laoyandao Mountain Villa" with her husband's support. But when expanding the scale of breeding and farming this time, Wu Zhenqiong ran into the difficulty of a shortage of funds. She had invested more than 1.8 million yuan in the early stage, building both pigpens and the villa at the same time, and later-stage investment could not keep up, and she also hit a wall applying for a bank loan. "Banks don't care how much cash flow you have; they only look at collateral." For this reason, Wu Zhenqiong ran around on and off for a year, yet the loan still did not succeed. "Only money going out, no money coming in." Wu Zhenqiong often suffered from insomnia in the middle of the night, and her weight dropped from more than 100 jin to 80 jin.
Later, Wu Zhenqiong changed her way of thinking: "Huddle together for warmth; you can't fight alone." A partner joined her entrepreneurial team. Using this partner's property as collateral, she obtained a bank loan of 2 million yuan.
When there were not enough hands, Wu Zhenqiong did everything, from growing vegetables to feeding pigs, becoming a "pig keeper"; then, turning around and putting on a business suit and black high heels, she was again a capable restaurant manager.
On this farm covering more than 200 mu, there is not only the villa that provides dining space, but also vegetable fields, pigpens, and fishponds, making it a rural leisure tourism site as well. More than 500 black pigs are raised in 300 pigpens. At the villa, guests can enjoy the pastoral scenery, watch the black pig breeding process, and then taste the black pig banquet developed by the villa itself.
Once, some out-of-town guests saw a patch of wild vegetables in the villa's planting area and specially asked the waitstaff to pick some and stir-fry them. "These wild vegetables are for feeding the pigs," Wu Zhenqiong told the guests. The guests were very surprised that the wild vegetables that usually sold at a high price in the market were actually a delicacy for black pigs. That meal left the guests very satisfied.
In Wu Zhenqiong's villa, half the area is used to grow vegetables: greens, potatoes, sweet potatoes, radishes... These vegetables are all used to feed the pigs. After the vegetables are chopped, they are mixed with rice bran, cornmeal, and the like, cooked in a large iron pot, without adding any feed at all, and that is the daily "delicacy" of the black pigs.
Ordinary white pigs are ready for market in four or five months, while Wu Zhenqiong's black pigs need at least 14 months, and some need 18 months before they are ready for market. "Feed pigs what people eat, and the pigs will give people more in return," Wu Zhenqiong said. People value health preservation and health care, and in the end what they pursue is green food.
A businessman from Hunan was introduced by a friend to eat "Laoyandao" pork, found the meat quality very good, and since then has regularly bought fresh meat from here, shipping it refrigerated by air to Beijing as gifts for relatives and family.
"Two jin of fresh meat make one jin of cured meat." Wu Zhenqiong said the process of making cured meat is also very particular: select good-quality meat, soak it in salt, Sichuan pepper, wine, and the like, marinate it for a week, and then repeatedly roast it; the whole process takes one and a half months. When the roasted cured meat is cut open, the meat inside is translucent, fatty but not greasy, and only then does it prove that the whole production process was successful.
"Mastering the heat is especially important." Wu Zhenqiong once had a painful lesson. Once, because the worker making the cured meat did not master the heat well, the fire was too strong, causing the outer layer of the cured meat to be scorched while the moisture in the inner layer had not yet been dried out. "A full 400 jin, pork worth tens of thousands of yuan, went down the drain." Although such cured meat was still edible, Wu Zhenqiong did not allow such cured meat to circulate on the market. "A brand that was built with so much effort cannot be wrecked."
Wu Zhenqiong said cured meat sells for 100 yuan per jin and fresh meat for 68 yuan per jin. Now the annual sales volume of cured meat is about 10,000 jin, while fresh meat is mainly sold through the restaurant.
Wu Zhenqiong positioned the sales of black pig pork toward people pursuing a healthy lifestyle. She opened her own "Laoyandao" restaurants in Kaili, the prefectural seat, and Guiyang, the provincial capital, and black pig pork is in short supply in these restaurants.
Seeing that Wu Zhenqiong's business prospects were getting better and better, nearby villagers also came to ask for piglets to develop pig farming. Over the past 3 years, Wu Zhenqiong has given villagers more than 3,600 local black native piglets free of charge, and after the pigs are grown, she buys them back at the agreed price.
Each time she distributes piglets, Wu Zhenqiong tends to choose villagers from remote places. Villagers deep in the mountains have little access to the swill that flows out of restaurants, so they can only feed the pigs with wild vegetables gathered locally. Although the growth cycle is longer, the quality is guaranteed.
After this year's Spring Festival, more and more villagers ordered piglets from her. The rapid rise in pork prices let many villagers see better returns. Wu Zhenqiong's pig-raising cooperation has only one principle: no feed and no swill may be used, and they must go up the mountain to dig wild vegetables. A large-scale breeder came to cooperate with her, telling her that as long as the pigs looked like black pigs on the outside, they could be fed feed, and that the sales channel could be guaranteed. Wu Zhenqiong did not agree. Even when working capital was at its most difficult, she never fed the pigs a single mouthful of feed. "The quality cannot change, and the 'Laoyandao' built with my own hands cannot be ruined."
Her years of striving while sticking to quality have brought Wu Zhenqiong many honors. In 2015, on the recommendation of the Guizhou Provincial Committee of the Communist Youth League, Wu Zhenqiong became a member of the All-China Youth Federation. Not long ago, Wu Zhenqiong also became a candidate for the 20th "China Youth May Fourth Medal." Recently, she made two special trips to Beijing to survey the market. She hopes to open a "Laoyandao" restaurant in Beijing so that people in Beijing can also eat black pork with real meat flavor.